Historical Streams of Bushwick Inlet and Newtown Creek

On Saturday, October 20th, NYC H2O partnered with artist Stacy Levy and Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park to paint the path of the historic Bushwick Inlet using chalk paint. You can view the video for the event above.You can also view the video on Vimeo by clicking here.

THE INDUSTRIAL WATERFRONT of Bushwick Inlet and Newtown Creek began in the 1640’s when Dutch and French settlers built the first tide mills harnessing water power to grind grain from local farms. From these first mills, the new dams, roads and shipping piers began the rapid landfilling of the marsh and stream landscapes.

The future of the shoreline was revolutionized in 1787 by the steam engine and the 1825 Erie Canal, opening up vast new markets and a demand for waterfront docks and ship yards. This accelerated the cutting down of hills and the filling of tidal marshes.

With the founding of Williamsburg in 1802, housing began replacing farms - the Land of Brooks became Brooklyn. The wet artesian spring lots that fed the marsh system were the last areas to be developed. These can be traced today through the open pattern of City parks, school playgrounds and vacant industrial parking lots.

During the 1880’s raw sewage and garbage were dumped into the creeks, and by 1902, the two main branches of Bushwick Creek were piped into the North 12th Street interceptor sewer. The last remnants of the landfilled Norman Kill marsh became McCarren Park in 1905.

In 2007, the State of New York opened East River State Park on 11 acres of property that were acquired in 2001 by the Trust for Public Land. In 2012, the City of New York opened the first phase of Bushwick Inlet Park, which when completed will add 27 acres of public open space to the waterfront. Both parks sit largely on landfill created in the 19th century. Those overlaid stories of industry and natural geography are echoed in often water-centered pollution patterns as well as its environmental restoration efforts as the neighborhood reinvents itself.

That buried landscape of water history remains both our heritage and future.

THE ECOLOGICAL HISTORY of the marshes remains hidden in patterns of trees and weeds of the concrete landscape, its richness captured in 1852 by James Riker Jr. In his Annals of Newtown: “Flocks of wild-fowl bathed in the streams across whose waters the timid beaver constructed its dams. Daylight was made vocal by hosts of plumed songsters, and the swamps echoed, through dismal glades, the nocturnal howlings of rapacious wolves, as they pursued to death some ill-fated victim.”

These salt and freshwater food habitats supported the first Native American settlement in Maspeth (the Place of Water Crossing) with Flushing Avenue a relic of their historic trail and footprints. Indian rice would have been harvested from local fresh pond waters, and shellfish such as oysters and mussels from the local salt marshes. Dutch raids in the mid 17th century removed the Maspeth Indians.

The Bushwick Dutch then competed with Queens English settlers for control of the land. Arbitration Rock marks the resolution of that early border conflict. The settlers took over the Indian corn fields, developing new crops for export such as the Newtown Pippin Apple in 1730. They used the rich farmlands of Long Island to help feed the growing Caribbean islands slave economy, getting in exchange sugar. Over the following century, the waterfront became a global market and industrial powerhouse. The Domino Sugar factory site remains a relic of that trade.

The first farm was laid out in 1646 north of Bushwick Creek by Dirck Volckertsen de Norman, a Norwegian ship’s carpenter and his wife Christina Vigne, a French Walloon.

That rich history of life, from farm slaves from Guinea who built the tide mill ponds for the Dutch to the immigrants who built the bustling shipping industry remains in the curves and old names of neighborhood streets. Greenpoint, Whale Creek and Fresh Pond Road all hint at the rich ecology that first attracted Native Americans and later colonial settlers to the shores of Newtown and Bushwick.

A clue to historical spring and well locations are the colonial farm houses. Before running water, they were typically located next to reliable fresh water supplies. The property edges of farms were often defined by “thalwegs” – the “valley path” of now gone stream beds. By looking for these strange angles of streets and large trees we can reconstruct the timeless flow of water that will still be there long after we are gone.

Pictures from our October 20th Bushwick Inlet Stream Painting event are on Facebook.

SOURCESHistorical maps used for this reconstruction came from the New York State Archives, New York Public Library, and David Rumsey Map Archives. Maps used include the 1766 Ratzer Map, 1797 Bedell Survey, 1837-1844 USGS Bache Hassler Survey (used as a base) 1851 Van Alst Bushwick Map, and the 1874 Beers Bushwick Map. The Modern Street Base used for calibration was the 2014 NYC DOITT base, with additional sewer pipe mapping from the NYC Department of Environmental Protection. Stream courses were adjusted based on cross referencing of historical maps by Eymund Diegel, (eymund @ gmail.com. ) in October 2018, with connecting streams and potential stream spring locations derived from a 2010 USGS Digital Elevation Runoff Flow Model corrected to changed landscape conditions. Thanks for original historical New York City stream research notes go to Eric Sanderson, of Welikia.org, Steve Duncan, of UnderCity.org, Sergey Kadinsky of Hidden Waters, and Public Lab Grassroots Mapping for site research, with additional historical expertise and assistance from Friends of Bushwick Inlet Park (bushwickinletpark.org) and NYC H2O (www.nych2o.org).